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GIVING LIFE TO LIFE: A Spring Retreat

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John Dunne: 07-21-2013: Revealing Nagarjuna (Part 8B, last part)

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Series Description: The Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (ca. 150 C.E.) famously articulated the notion of emptiness or sunyata as a tool for understanding ultimate reality. Based on selected primary texts such as his Wisdom, this seminar explores Nagarjuna’s thought and its powerful effect on subsequent Buddhist philosophy. Inquiring into the key concept of sunyata, we will see how it relates to interdependence and compassion, and we will ask how it is possible to experience sunyata in meditative practice.

Episode Description: In the final segment of the program, John begins with the fact that the phenomenal field presents itself in terms of subject and object, both of which seem truly existent. In the visual field, for instance, objects present themselves as “out there” and seem real to the subject perceiving them “in here.” However, this structure of phenomenal experience is false. There is no “out there” nor “in here.” Furthermore, there is no real object or subject. The dropping away of “what is to be perceived” and “the perceiver” represents an emptiness of the very structure of subject and object, which subtly underlies our entire cognitive system. When this basic structure falls away, what is “left over” is a “luminosity,” “reflexive awareness,” “suchness,” or even, the “ultimate.” Even this luminosity, however, is empty, and not to be reified. Thus we are left with the “emptiness of emptiness.” John concludes the program with some final words about wisdom and compassion. First, perhaps the deepest implication of the philosophy of emptiness is that in emptiness, there is no wisdom to obtain nor ignorance to abandon. In other words, there is no Path. When we see that wisdom and ignorance arise together, that they are “of the same taste,” there is no longer a distinction to be made. In this light, even samsara and nirvana are empty. John ends with the remarkable idea that compassion is what drives world-making, that compassion is built into awareness, and that it is what “remains in emptiness.”

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GIVING LIFE TO LIFE: A Spring Retreat from April 3 - 5, 2015.This weekend retreat gives us the rare opportunity to drop into the deep questions related to time, life, death, rebirth, and no birth no death.